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IDOLS 



IDOLS OF EDUCATION 

SELECTED AND ANNOTATED 
By CHARLES MILLS GAYLEY 



Ephriam is joined to idols. Hos. iv, 17 




NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

MCMX 



V 



**>* 



ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 



COPYRIGHT, 19 IO, BY DOUBLED AY, PAGE & COMPANY 
PUBLISHED, FEBRUARY, I9IO 



ift AHb 



•t 18 



TO 

JAMES BURRILL ANGELL 

STATESMAN AND ADMINISTRATOR 

SCHOLAR, ORATOR AND TEACHER 

COUNSELLOR 

FRIEND 

MOULDER OF UNIVERSITIES 

MAKER OF MEN 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

I. A World of Opportunity . 3 

-rll. An Indifferent Generation . 11 

> III. The Bandar-log ... 17 

IV. The Man of Argos . . .27 

\/ V. The Staggers and the Care- 
less Lapse .... 33 

VI. The Advance of Democracy . 49 

VII. Idols of the Tribe . . . 57 

VIII. Idols of the Academic Mar- 
ket-place . . . . 69 

IX. Some Wages of Inevitable 
Grace, Caprice, and Quick 

Returns 81 

X. The Collapse of Culture . 91 *- 

XI. Some Wages of Pedantry . 105 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

XII. Some Wages of Play . .113 

XIII. The Collapse of Discipline . 121 

XIV. Idols of the Academic Cave . 131 

XV. Some "Idols" of My Own . 143 

XVI. Some More "Idols" of My 

Own 157 

XVII. Obiter Dicta .... 175 



A WORLD OF OPPORTUNITY 



IDOLS 

A WORLD OF OPPORTUNITY 

THE world was never better worth 
preparing for. The panorama un- 
rolled before the mind was never more 
gorgeous: — a new renaissance revealing 
reaches unimagined; prophesying splen- 
dour unimaginable; unveiling mysteries 
of time and space and natural law and 
human potency. 

Archaeology uncovers with a spade the 
world of Ariadne and of Minos, of Aga- 
memnon and of Priam. Where Jason 
launched the Argo, paintings are un- 
earthed that antedate Apelles. Mum- 
mied crocodiles disgorge their papyri: 
[3] 



IDOLS 

and we read the administrative record of 
the Ptolemies. Bacchylides breaks the 
silence of centuries; himself Menander 
mounts the stage, and in no borrowed 
Roman sock; and Aristotle reappears to 
shed fresh light upon the constitution of 
the Athenians. 

History availing herself of cognate sci- 
ences deciphers documents and conditions 
anew; and the vision of the past is rein- 
terpreted in terms of social and economic 
actuality. Emigrations and conquests 
become a modern tale of commerce and 
industrial stress. Csesar and Agrippina, 
Cromwell and Marie Antoinette, are all 
to read again; and the Bard of Venusia 
acquires a new and startling modernity 
as the literary advance agent of a pluto- 
cratic wine firm. As in a "glass pros- 
pective" literature is viewed; and kalei- 
doscopic transformations of gest and bal- 
[4] 



IDOLS 

lad, epic and drama, cross-sections of the 
crypt of fiction, dazzle the eye of critic and 
philologist and poet. 

With golden keys of psychology, his- 
tory and philology, the anthropologist 
unlocks the mind of primitive man. The 
student of the holier things invades the 
Temple itself; and from day to day the 
sacramental doors swing back on age- 
long galleries of worship. 

Taking fresh heart of ethics, econo- 
mics wears a new and most seductive 
smile. No longer the minimizing of 
material cost, but the maximizing of 
vital value, she regards. She seeks the 
psychic income, the margin of leisure for 
the soul, the margin of health for the 
body: the greatest of national assets — 
the true wealth of nations. To the mod- 
ern problems of social and political theory 
and of jurisprudence, of municipal and 
[5] 



IDOLS 

national and colonial administration, a 
similar fascination of beneficent discov- 
ery attracts; and to that development of 
international politics which aims at con- 
stitutional law rather than the substantive 
private law of nations. 

Geology multiplies her seons, and as- 
tronomy her glittering fields. " Hills peep 
o'er hills, and Alps on Alps" of new dis- 
covered cause "arise." "The idea of 
the electron has broken the frame work 
of the old physics to pieces, has revived 
ancient atomistic hypotheses, and made 
of them principles," and radio-activity 
" has opened to the explorer a New Amer- 
ica full of wealth yet unknown." The 
science of the law of celestial movements 
has given birth to the science of the sub- 
stance of celestial bodies ; and, with astro- 
physics, we study more narrowly than 
ever our one star, and its outcasts, the 
[6] 



IDOLS 

planets. We wonderingly contemplate 
the transport of matter from star to 
star — and from planet to planet, maybe, 
of life. 

Geology has given birth to physi- 
ography. We pass from inorganic to 
organic, and probe the interaction of 
physical environment and animate nature. 
In evolutionary science they are saying 
that new species leap into being at a 
wave of the wand of mutation; and the 
war between Mendelism and Darwinism 
wages. The knighthood of the Quest of 
Life enrolls in the order of psychic 
mystery or the order of mechanism, 
and presses on. Though neither win 
to the Grail, each wins nearer to its 
law. By the delicate ministrations of 
surgery, life is prolonged. Immunization 
lifts ever higher her red cross. 

Engineering advances, agriculture 
[7] 



IDOLS 

advances, commerce expands. We com- 
pass the earth, we swim the seas, we 
ride the air. Our voices pierce the inter- 
vals of space, and our thoughts the 
unplumbed waves of ether. And from 
her watch-tower scrutinizing all — 
science, pure and applied, history and 
art, mechanism and spirit, teleology, 
evolution — the science of sciences, 
Divine Philosophy rounds out her calm 
survey. Never more tempting, more 
vital, the problem than that which she 
faces now; the problem of the funda- 
mental character of personality. "In 
the light of all this evolution or mutation, 
what is God?" she asks. "Is he, too, 
but a cosmic process in which we assist; 
or an eternal standard of perfection 
against which we measure ourselves and 
in terms of which we strive?" 

[8] 



AN INDIFFERENT GENERATION 



AN INDIFFERENT GENERATION 

THE world of learning was never 
better worth preparing for. Why is 
it, then, that from every university in 
the land, and from every serious journal, 
there goes up the cry, "Our young 
people were never more indifferent". 
How many nights a week does the 
student spend in pursuits non-academic; 
how great a proportion of his days? 
What with so-called "college activities," 
by which he must prove his allegiance 
to the University, and social functions by 
which he must recreate his jaded soul, 
no margin is left for the one and only 
college activity — which is study. Class 
meetings, business meetings, committee 

[no 



IDOLS 

meetings, editorial meetings, football ral- 
lies, baseball rallies, pyjama rallies, vica- 
rious athletics on the bleachers, garrulous 
athletics in dining room and parlour and 
on the porch, rehearsals of the glee club, 
rehearsals of the mandolin club and of 
the banjo, rehearsals for dramatics (a 
word to stand the hair on end), college 
dances and class banquets, fraternity 
dances and suppers, preparations for the 
dances and banquets, more committees 
for the preparations; a running up and 
down the campus for ephemeral items 
for ephemeral articles in ephemeral 
papers, a soliciting of advertisements, 
a running up and down for subscrip- 
tions to the dances and the dinners, and 
the papers and the clubs; a running up 
and down in college politics, making 
tickets, pulling wires, adjusting combina- 
tions, canvassing for votes — canvas- 
[12] 



IDOLS 

sing the girls for votes, spending hours 
at sorority houses for votes — spending 
hours at sorority houses for sentiment; 
talking rubbish unceasingly, thinking 
rubbish, revamping rubbish — rubbish 
about high jinks, rubbish about low, 
rubbish ahout rallies, rubbish about 
pseudo-civic honour, rubbish about 
girls ; — what margin of leisure is left 
for the one activity of the college, which 
is study? 

In Oxford and Cambridge, than which 
no universities have turned out finer, 
cleaner, more manly, more highly culti- 
vated, and more practically trained 
scholars, statesmen, empire builders, or 
more generous enthusiasts for general 
athletics and clean sport — in Oxford 
and Cambridge the purpose is study, 
and the honours are paid to the scholar. 
There are no undergraduate newspapers, 
[13] 



IDOLS 

no class meetings, no college politics, no 
football rallies, no business managers, 
no claques for organized applause, no 
yell leaders, no dances, no social func- 
tions of the mass. Social intercourse 
during term between the sexes is strictly 
forbidden; and it is a matter of college 
loyalty to live up to the rule. Of non- 
academic activities there are but two — 
athletics and conversation. They are 
not a function but a recreation; nor are 
they limited to specialists whose reputa- 
tion is professed. Young Oxonians, in 
general, lead a serene and undistracted, 
but rich and wholesome life. They cul- 
tivate athletics because each is an active 
devotee of some form of sport. And 
conversation — in junior commons, in 
the informal clubs, in study or in tutor's 
room — it is an education, a passion, 
an art. 

[14] 



THE BANDAR-LOG 



•- 



THE BANDAR-LOG 

A FOREIGNER, attending, in an 
American university, an assembly 
of student speakers, will be justified in con- 
cluding that the university exists for 
nothing but so-called "student activi- 
ties." The real purpose of the university 
will not be mentioned, for usually our 
undergraduates live two lives — distinct; 
one utterly non-academic. The non- 
academic is for them the real ; the schol- 
arly an encroachment. The student who 
regards the scholarly as paramount is 
deficient in "allegiance to his university." 
Athletics meanwhile, which should 
play a necessary part in the physical, 
and therefore spiritual, development of 
[17] 



IDOLS 

all students, are relegated to ten per cent, 
of the students. The rest assist — on 
the bleachers. The ninety per cent, 
are killing two birds with one stone. 
They are taking second-hand exercise; 
and, by their grotesque and infantile 
applause, they are displaying what they 
call their "loyalty." 

Those nodes, coenaeque deum of history 
and poetry and philosophical discourse, 
to the memory of which the older gene- 
ration reverts with rapture, have faded 
in this light of common day. In the hurry 
of mundane pursuit the student rarely 
halts to read, rarely to consider ; rarely to 
discuss the concerns of the larger life. 

President Schurman has recently said 
that there has been no decline of scholar- 
ship in the people's universities; but 
only in the older institutions of the East, 
to which rich parents send their sons 
[18] 



IDOLS 

with the view to the advantages of social 
position; and that in the people's uni- 
versities the social standing of students 
has never cut so much figure as scholar- 
ship. The assurance is comfortable; but 
it obscures the issue. If by "social 
standing" the President of Cornell means 
position in the coteries of wealth, fashion, 
conviviality, it may be that " social stand- 
ing" bulks larger in the older university 
than in the university of the state. But 
the fact is, that in student esteem, East 
and West, social standing means no such 
thing: it means the position achieved 
by prominence in non-academic or 
"campus" activities. And in student 
esteem such prominence cuts a far more 
important figure than that of either 
wealth or scholarship. Such prominence 
has been gaining ground for fifteen years. 
So long as the social pressure of the 
[19] 



IDOLS 

university is toward mundane pursuits, 
it will be vain to expect the student to 
achieve distinction in that for which the 
university stands. 

This false standard of prominence, 
with its feigned allegiance to the inter- 
ests of the University, has produced 
that class of student which, adapting 
from the Jungle Book, I call the 
"Bandar-log." 

"Mowgli had never seen an Indian 
city before, and though this was almost 
a heap of ruins it seemed very wonderful 
and splendid. Some king had built it 

long ago on a little hill 

The Bandar-logs called the place their 
city, and pretended to despise the jungle 
people because they lived in the forest. 
And yet they never knew what the build- 
ings were made for nor how to use them. 
They would sit in circles in the hall of 
[20] 



IDOLS 

the King's council-chamber and scratch 
for flees and pretend to be men; or they 
would run in and out of the roofless 
houses and collect pieces of plaster and 
old bricks in the corner and forget where 
they had hidden them, and fight and cry 
in scuffling crowds, and then break off 
to play up and down the terraces of the 
King's garden, where they would shake 
the rose trees and the oranges in sport 
to see the fruit and flowers fall. They 
explored all the passages and dark tun- 
nels in the palace, and the hundreds of 
little dark rooms, but they never remem- 
bered what they had seen and what they 
had not, and so drifted about in ones 
and twos or crowds, telling one another 
that they were doing as men did — 
or shouting 'there are none in the jungle 
so wise and good and clever and strong 
and gentle as the Bandar-log.' Then 
[21] 



IDOLS 

they would tire and seek the treetop, 
hoping the jungle people would notice 
them . . . and then they joined hands 
and danced about and sang their fool- 
ish songs. 'They have no law,' said 
Mowgli to himself, 'no hunting call and 
no leaders' . . . And he could not 
help laughing when they cried, 'we are 
great, we are free, we are wonderful . . . 
we all say so, and so it must be true . . . 
you shall carry our words back to the 
jungle people that they may notice us in 
future.'" 

The Bandar-log is with us. Busy to 
no purpose, imitative, aimless; boast- 
ful but unreliant; inquisitive but quickly 
losing his interest; fitful, inconsequential, 
platitudinous, forgetful; noisy, sudden, 
ineffectual.— The Bandar-log must go. 

Because it is the spirit of the American 
university to prove the things that are 
[22] 



IDOLS 

new, to hold fast that which is good; to 
face abuses boldly and to reform them; 
because I am the son of an American 
university, and have grown in her teach- 
ing, and in my observation of many 
universities and many schools, to regard 
the evil as transitory and abuses as 
remediable, I have ventured, in this essay 
to set down simply, and with a frankness 
that I trust may not be misconstrued, 
some of the vagaries of our educational 
system at the present time, and some of 
the reasons for their existence. For I 
am sure that in the recognition of the 
cause is to be found the means of cure. 



[23] 



THE MAN OF ARGOS 



THE MAN OF ARGOS 

ANOTHER class also of students 
L makes, though unconsciously, for 
the wane of general scholarship — the 
class of the prematurely vocational. It is 
not futile, like that of the Bandar-log, 
but earnest, and with a definite end in 
view. Still, unwisely guided to imma- 
ture choice and hasty study of a pro- 
fession, it not only misses the liberal 
equipment necessary for the ultimate 
mastery of life, but indirectly diverts 
the general scope of education from its 
true ideals. 

The spirit of the Renaissance, says a 
modern historian of poetry, is portrayed 
in a picture by Moretto. It is of a 
[27] 



IDOLS 

young Venetian noble. "The face is 
that of one in the full prime of life 
and of great physical strength; very 
handsome, heavy and yet tremulously 
sensitive, the large eyes gazing at some 
thing unseen, and seeming to dream 
of vastness. On his bonnet is a golden 
plaque with three words of Greek 
inscribed on it — lov \Cav woOco — "Oh, 
but I am consumed with excess of 
desire." 

If this be the motto of the Renais- 
sance, what shall we say is the motto of 
to-day? Not lov \lav ttoOco; no creed of 
vague insatiable yearning, but rather 

the irdvTa avrUa 7rod(o — the lust for 

immediate and universal possession: as 
who should cry, 

"I want no little here below, 
I want it all, and quick." 
In one of his odes, Pindar, lauding 
[28] 



IDOLS 

the older times when the Muse had not 
yet learned to work for hire, breaks off 
"but now she biddeth us observe the 
saying of the Man of Argos, 'Money 
maketh man ' ' — xPVf JLara > XPVP' ai? &vvp. 
If not money, then sudden success — 
that is the criterion of the Man of Argos, 
to-day. 

The Bandar-log and the Argive retard 
the advance of scholarship in the uni- 
versity; and not the university alone is 
responsible for their presence, but the 
elementary school as well. 



[29] 



THE STAGGERS AND THE CARELESS 
LAPSE 



THE STAGGERS AND THE CARELESS 
LAPSE 

OF THE effectiveness of the public 
schools in the several states, the 
universities of each state respectively 
may judge. From Harvard, Yale and 
Princeton to California and Stanford the 
judgment is a groan. Is the fault with 
'the schools ? or is the standard of require- 
ment too high? or is the basis of con- 
clusion in each case too narrow? The 
reply may best be given by one who 
examines pupils of all states. 

"Probably nowhere else," writes 
Colonel Larned of the United States 
Military Academy, in the North Ameri- 
can Review of September, 1908, "prob- 
[33] 



IDOLS 

ably nowhere else can the general 
effectiveness of our public schools be 
so well gauged as at the academies 
at West Point and Annapolis. Their 
candidates are drawn from every Con- 
gressional District of every state and 
territory of the Union, and largely from 
the class of our citizens who send their 
children to the primary and high schools 
supported by the states." The subjects 
of examination are elementary: algebra, 
geometry, grammar, composition and 
literature, geography, and history. 
"The examinations are written, and 
abundant time is given for their com- 
pletion, even by those of inferior capacity 
and preparation. The papers are 
marked on a scale of one hundred as a 
maximum; sixty-six being the normal 
minimum standard of proficiency." 
Generally speaking, deficiency in one 
[34] 



IDOLS 

subject constitutes deficiency in the whole 
examination. Out of 314 candidates 
who attempted the entrance papers in 
March, 1908, 265 failed: 56 in one sub- 
ject, 209 in two or more subjects. Of 
the failures there were 44 per cent, in 
algebra; 61 per cent, in geometry; 37 
per cent, in grammar; 40 per cent, in 
composition and literature. "Out of the 
314 examined mentally it appears that 
295, or 90 per cent., had been educated in 
public schools, and that the average num- 
ber of years of attendance in these schools 
was nine years, eleven months. Separa- 
ting this into primary and secondary 
attendance, we find that the average at- 
tendance in High Schools was three years, 
three months ; and in Grammar Schools, 
six years, eight months. 103 candidates 
had private schooling wholly or in part, 
135 had college education of one year or 
[35] 



IDOLS 

more ; 1 89 studied the classics. Of the 135 
who had gone so far as a college education 
of one year or more, 82 failed to enter. 

"Altogether," comments the writer, 
"it is a sorry showing, from what- 
ever standpoint it is viewed. . . . 
Many of these young men secured 
their nominations through competitive 
examinations; and few, if any, could 
have been taken haphazard, with no 
regard to qualification and antecedents; 
while all could have been employed 
some nine months in private preparation. 
That 314 youths, nearly all trained in 
our costly public schools, with an average 
of almost ten years' attendance (supple- 
mented in the case of one-third of their 
number by private schooling, and, in 
the case of 43 per cent., by college train- 
ing) should show 84 per cent, of failure 
and the various deficiencies analyzed 
[36] 



IDOLS 

above, is surely a state of affairs that 
should make the judicious grieve and 
our educators sit up and take notice. 
"If," continues the compiler of this 
unanswerable arraignment, "if educa- 
tion is concerned with mental develop- 
ment alone, it is fair to ask: If 16,596,- 
503 boys and girls, taught in our public 
schools at a cost of $376,996,472, aver- 
age no better in intellectual attainments 
than is evidenced by the foregoing, does 
the result justify the outlay and the ten 
or more years' apprenticeship of youth it 
demands?" 

The boy enters our colleges " a badly 
damaged article." One-sidedly prepared, or 
not prepared at all, he goes through college 
accumulating courses, but not education; 
desperately selecting studies least foreign 
to his slender capability for assimilation, 
[37] 



IDOLS 

or most easy to slur, or most likely to turn 
to superficial ends. He is by no means 
always lazy, nor oblivious that now is 
the chance of his life; but he has no core 
of knowledge to which the facts he fum- 
bles may cling, no keen-edged lingu- 
istic or scientific tools with which to cut 
to the heart of the matter; no memory 
trained and enriched, no taste, no imagi- 
nation, no judgment balanced by frequent 
trial, no habits of remorseless application. 
He has bluff but not confidence; he has 
promise, but not power. The subjects 
of his study have not been correlated. 
The goal has been neither discipline nor 
intrinsic worth. He has probably never 
studied one thing thoroughly. He has 
not been guided ; he has not been taught ; 
he has not conquered work. He has 
been distracted; he has been amused. 
In college he is thrown with comrades 
[38] 



IDOLS 

of like equipment. None probably has 
had all the fundamentals requisite to 
any one study. A heterogenous con- 
course, fortuitous, divergent, immane. 
To the individuals of such a class, no 
teacher could impart drill or rationally 
progressive information: Not Orbilius, 
not Erasmus. In the humanities, espe- 
cially, it is impossible to drive a class 
abreast. And if the tutor tries tandem, 
what with one-third springhalt of French, 
another hamstrung of German, another 
spavined of Latin, the ninety-and-nine 
infested with bots prejudicial to Greek, 
the course is doomed — cast 

" Into the staggers and the careless lapse 
Of youth and ignorance." 

We turn out from our American 
departments of the liberal arts, many 
clean and manly men, noble and earn- 
est women. But how many even of 
[39] 



IDOLS 

these know the rudiments of one sub- 
ject thoroughly, can think clearly, reason 
accurately, express a thought lucidly, 
effectively, correctly? How many can 
spell, how many write a letter not illit- 
erate, how many use a diction simple, 
pure and idiomatic, clearly enounced, 
justly pronounced? How many know 
the difference between Sennacherib and 
a floating rib, the Maid of Orleans and 
the Maid of Athens, the Witch of Endor 
and the Widow of Nain, Dionysius and 
Dionysus, the Jewels of Cornelia and 
the diamond necklace, the Lion of 
Judah and the Lion of the North? 
Or, if some have some vague impression 
of some of these things, for how many 
do they possess an historical or literary 
flavour? If a speaker refer to Apollyon 
or the Houyhnhms, to the Delectable 
Mountains, or Mount Hymettus, or the 
[40] 



IDOLS 

Horn of Roncesvalles ; if he quote a 
line of Horace, a French bon mot or a 
German commonplace; if he refer to 
the Seven against Thebes, the Electra, 
the Bucolics, the Telemaque, the Sor- 
rows of Werther, to Giotto's O or Botti- 
celli's Spring, to Gargantua or Pompilia, 
how many eyes light with recognition ? I 
do not mean in an assembly of technical 
or professional students, but of "liberal" 
students. And if some students of litera- 
ture and history have definite acquaint- 
ance with some of these things, have 
they also definite acquaintance with the 
fundamentals of philosophy, mathe- 
matics and science, no less significant? 
With what real command of any foreign 
language do our students go forth? It 
is well for us that the peoples of Europe 
are the most courteous of men. Long 
ago they learned from Aristotle that it 
[41] 



IDOLS 

was inartistic to laugh at painful impo- 
tence or deformity. 

If these imperfections hold true of 
our graduates of literary departments, 
they hold, so far as elementary culture 
is concerned, even more frequently true 
of our vocational students. But those 
who pursue the practical arts and the 
sciences have no less occasion to speak, 
to write, to communicate, expound, con- 
vince, persuade than the humanists: 
they too are working for and with men. 
To the vocational student the studies 
that not only instruct but educate, that 
make not only for knowledge but for 
power, for efficiency characterized by 
judgment and taste — to the vocational 
student the humanities are not, by neces- 
sity or immutable decree, alien. 

Illiteracy is not a hall-mark exclu- 
sively reserved to the student body. 
[42] 



IDOLS 

Our Ph. D.'s are lamentably prone to 
error in the use of their own tongue. 
Of the later crop of instructors in universi- 
ties, some say "he don't," "hospi'table," 
"luckrative," "exquisite," "minerology" 
— confessing that "they hadn't ought to"; 
others never fail, they "fall down"; they 
never win, they "win out"; they are never 
at a loss, though they are frequently "up 
against it." When they lecture in plain 
clothes, the outcome is a dis 'course; 
when in a dinner jacket, an ad'dress. 
Recently, a specialist, already teaching 
in an Eastern college, was highly recom- 
mended for an instructorship in a 
Western university by the authorities 
of the Eastern university where he had 
published an ostensibly learned thesis 
and secured his degree of Doctor of 
Philosophy. In writing he "refered" 
to a previous letter, and in conversation 
[43] 



IDOLS 

suggested that we "leave things go as 
they are. " We did. To rehearse such 
amenities would be invidious, were they 
not of every-day occurrence, and the 
offenders dulled by custom and con- 
genial apathy. 

Our graduates are characterized by 
lack of information, lack of grasp, lack 
of culture. This is no prejudiced account 
of the case. It is attested by the ver- 
dict of our leaders at the bar, on the 
bench, in the pulpit and in the hospital, 
and by our captains of industry. Also by 
educated foreigners. Our Rhodes schol- 
ars should certainly represent the flower 
of our scholarship. But even kindly 
critics in Oxford, while admiring the 
sociability, good sense, good humour, 
broad outlook of the American student, 
will tell you: "The American student 
is, with few exceptions, deficient in his 
[44] 



IDOLS 

own language, spoken or written; and 
has but the smattering of any other. 
He is more often superficial than ours, 
and is more easily satisfied. He does 
not seem to understand what it is inde- 
pendently to master a subject, to grasp 
it in all its ramifications, and retain it 
in his memory as a whole." This criti- 
cism, be it noted, applies more particu- 
larly to our students of the humanities. 
In the pursuit of natural science and in 
the special discipline of the law our 
Rhodes scholars have made a better 
showing. But in general, their cultural, 
especially linguistic, limitations, are a 
raising of the eyebrow for don and 
student of English training. 



[45] 



THE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY 



THE ADVANCE OF DEMOCRACY 

THE Bandar-log and the Man of 
Argos are the product of condi- 
tions: the advance of democracy and 
the bewilderment of education. Since 
the latter condition reflects demands 
presented by the former, it is in contem- 
porary makeshifts of education that we 
shall find the ultimate cause of woe. 

The demands of democracy are not 
a matter to scold about: They are a 
condition to face. Democracy has ar- 
rived. It has achieved its privileges, 
its responsibilities too. It has arrived 
in social comfort and social unrest; in 
industrial promise and industrial per- 
plexity; in commercial expansion and 
[49] 



IDOLS 

commercial lure; in political potency 
and political menace. It has arrived in 
education. It has arrived with unlet- 
tered zeal and unfettered authority; 
scornful of tradition, oblivious of diffi- 
culties, impatient of delay. It has ar- 
rived with its ideal: The greatest hap- 
piness for the greatest number. It regards 
learning as a means, not also an end 
in itself. With democracy the means 
is the practical; the end is the profit- 
able, the immediate, for the greatest 
number. 

With these preconceptions democracy 
has arrived- The old culture cannot 
supply the school with teachers. De- 
mocracy is supplying its own teach- 
ers. They have the flavour of their 
kind: only too commonly they regard 
education as a means and means alone, 
for profit and profit alone. The few 
[50] 



IDOLS 

who think otherwise, how can they stem 
the tide? In the elementary schools it 
is impossible to discriminate between 
the crowd and the individual; between 
mediocrity or incapacity on one hand, 
and excellence on the other. The pace 
is determined by the pupil somewhat 
below the average. Approved by teach- 
ers — honest and zealous to be sure, 
but in many cases none the less unlet- 
tered — this pupil still below the average 
invades the high school. In its turn, 
the high school struggles to stem the 
tide. The high school has teachers more 
critical and better trained, but it, too, 
must regard the greatest happiness of 
the greatest number. The greatest num- 
ber debouches upon the university. The 
son or daughter of every taxpayer has an 
inalienable right to a university educa- 
tion; hence to the bachelor's degree. 
[51] 



IDOLS 

Democracy objects to flood gates. Its 
ideal is not the efficiency of the fit. 

This sudden and overwhelming de- 
mand for education, in itself of glori- 
ous promise, is attended by material 
penalties still other than those which we 
have noted in passing: the insufficiency 
of teachers' salaries, for instance, and 
the resulting feminization of our schools. 
Of the latter, suffice it here to say, that 
it partly accounts for the disrepute into 
which the humanities have fallen, for, 
entrusted to women, the languages, lit- 
erature, and history have come to be 
regarded as feminine and ineffectual 
studies; and for the cosseting of boys, 
and the consequent undisciplined char- 
acter of the rising generation of men. 
In our universities, the tremendous influx 
of students, the confusion, the rush and 
hurry of modern life, have contributed 
[52] 



IDOLS 

to the effect, finally, that we have lost, 
as Professor Birge has said, "the sweet 
serenity of books, and have not gained 
the freedom of pure research. We have 
lost the independence born of detach- 
ment from life, and have not gained the 
poise of practical efficiency. We have 
lost the sense of mastery of ourselves and 
of our public, and in all things we have 
become experimental. In brief, we have 
suffered and are suffering from that 
distraction of spirit which always accom- 
panies great and rapidly acquired gains; 
gains too large to be quickly mastered 
or readily put to full and easy use." 



[53] 



IDOLS OF THE TRIBE 



IDOLS OF THE TRIBE 

ROGER BACON, long ago, and 
after him, Francis, in their quest 
of truth, perceived that there were four 
grounds of human error. Of these the 
first is "the false appearances that are 
imposed upon us by the general nature 
of the mind" of man. The mind is 
always prone to accept the affirmative 
or active as proof rather than the nega- 
tive; so that if you hit the mark a few 
times you forget the many that you 
missed it. You worship Neptune for the 
numerous pictures in his temple of those 
that escaped shipwreck, but you omit 
to ask, "Where are the pictures of those 
that were drowned?" And because you 
[57] 



IDOLS 

are mentally equipped to seek uniformity, 
you ascribe to "Nature a greater equal- 
ity and uniformity than is, in truth." 
In this refractory mind of man "the 
beams of things" do not "reflect accord- 
ing to their true incidence"; hence our 
fundamental superstitions, fallacies which 
Francis Bacon calls the Idols, or delu- 
sions, of the Race, or Tribe. 

In matters of education the dearest 
delusion of our Tribe to-day is that the 
university should reflect the "public. This 
is the idol of the Popular Voice. Once 
the university is joined to this idol, it is 
joined to all the idols of that Pantheon. 
It accepts the fallacy that our sons and 
daughters are equally gifted and zealous, 
and hence that each must profit by the 
higher education. This is the idol of 
Inevitable Grace; that is, of grace innate 
and irresistible by which every youth is 
[58] 



IDOLS 

predestinated to intellectual life, "with- 
out any foresight of faith or good 
works, or perseverance in either of them, 
or any other thing in the creature, as 
conditions or causes moving him there- 
unto," or anything in the tutor. No 
Calvinistic favour this, by which some 
are chosen while others are ordained to 
ignorance and sloth; but a favour not 
contemplated in the Westminster Con- 
fession, by which all are elect and all, 
in due season, effectually called to learn- 
ing, and quickened and renewed by the 
Spirit of Zeal, and so enabled to answer 
this call and embrace the Grace offered 
and conveyed in it. The university is 
then joined to the idol of Numbers. 
And of these worships the shibboleth is 
"mediocrity": for to raise the standard 
of university requirement is to discrim- 
inate between candidates, and to doubt 
[59] 



IDOLS 

Inevitable Grace; while to decrease the 
bloated registration is a sacrilege which 
Numbers will avenge with curtailment 
of prosperity. And the ritual march is 
by lock-step: for tests, competition and 
awards are alien to the American spirit 
thus misrepresented — save athletic com- 
petition: that is a divine exception. 

The university is next joined to the 
idol of Quick Returns. It accepts the 
fallacy of utilitarian purpose; and hence, 
that a profession must be chosen pre- 
maturely and immaturely entered; and 
hence that studies are not for discipline 
or intrinsic worth but, from the primary 
school to the Ph. D., for purely voca- 
tional value; and hence that every incip- 
ient vocation from making toy boats 
and paper mats to making tariffs and 
balloons must find its place in every 
school and in every grade for every 
[60] 



IDOLS 

man-or-woman child. And since the 
man-or-woman child may find per- 
chance a vocation in the liberal arts, 
the child must bestride both horses, 
though with the usual aerial result. 
And our students — they worship the 
idol of Incidental Issues: the fallacy 
that the aim of the university is deliber- 
ately to make character. As if character 
were worth anything without mind, and 
were any other, as President Wilson has 
wisely said, than the by-product of duty 
performed; or that the duty of the 
student were any other than to study. 
They accept the fallacy that the gauge 
of studentship is popularity, and that 
popularity during academic years is to 
be won by hasty achievement and the 
babbling strenuous life, by allegiance 
to a perverted image of the Alma Mater, 
by gregariousness, by playing at citi- 
[61] 



IDOLS 

zenship. Of this popularity the out- 
ward and visible index is mundane 
prominence and the lightly proffered 
laurel of the campus. 

I said that the dearest delusion of the 
Tribe was that the university should 
reflect the public. But this delusion 
requires also that our universities be 
continually figuring in the public eye. 
So far as such activity is necessary to 
the building up of schools, and to the 
education of a community to an under- 
standing of the ideals and the needs of 
higher education, it is not only legitimate 
but laudable. But when, under the 
name of university extension our uni- 
versities undertake the higher education 
of the periphery, in dilletantism or 
methods of research, they run the risk 
of university attenuation and simulation. 
[62] 



IDOLS 

When, not dispassionately, they figure 
in public issues, they lay themselves 
open to the charge of partisanship. 
Time was when academic etiquette for- 
bade the university professor to partici- 
pate in political contests. Now there 
are who dare to inject the university 
into prejudiced affairs; even into crimi- 
nal cases pending in the courts. They 
have joined themselves to the idol of 
Parade. 

To this same false policy of figuring in 
the public eye our universities bow when 
they sanction amphitheatrical spec- 
tacles, at some of which money enough 
passes hands to build a battleship. 
Football is a most desirable recreation; 
and a moral and physical discipline of 
value to every able-bodied boy. Nay 
more, athletics, physical sport and emu- 
lation are necessary to spiritual health. 
[63] 



IDOLS 

Even excess in them is better, it has 
often been said, than that moral evil 
should abound. But is the alternative 
necessary? Must we have either gladi- 
ators or degenerates? Need athletics 
be professionalized, be specialized? 
Do specialized athletics benefit the morals 
of the ninety and nine who don't play ? 
Do they not rather spoil sport, detract 
from time and tendency to exercise 
for oneself? Do they not substitute 
hysteria for muscular development ? 
Football is a noble game; but it is with 
disgust that one views its degeneration 
from an exhilarating pastime for all into 
a profession of the few, a source of 
newspaper notoriety, a cause of extrava- 
gance, orgiastic self-abandonment, and 
educational shipwreck. This comes of 
bowing to the idol of Parade. 

The university should not adopt the 
[64] 



IDOLS 

idols of the community. It should set 
the ideals. The American university 
is, and ever must be, democratic. It 
offers education to all who can profit 
by it. But education itself is aristo- 
cratic — of the best and for the best. 
The educated are those who, having 
striven, are the chosen few. 



[65| 



IDOLS OF THE ACADEMIC MARKET- 
PLACE 



IDOLS OF THE ACADEMIC MARKET- 
PLACE 

BEWILDERED by the advance of 
democracy, educators not only 
have accepted fallacies of the Tribe, but 
have attempted to justify their acceptance 
by further fallacies of their own — based 
some upon a juggling with words, others 
upon the authority of some Pundit (living 
or dead) , others upon individual ignorance 
and conceit. These are respectively, what 
Bacon has called the idols of the Market- 
place, the idols of the Lecture-room or 
Theatre, the idols of the Cave. 

Idols of the Market - place are fallacies 
proceeding from the misconception of 
words. Since we educators are an imi- 
[69] 



IDOLS 

tative race, many of these misconceptions 
have been fostered or confirmed by the 
influence of some great name, Rousseau 
or Froebel, or Jacotot, or another; that 
is to say, by authority. Consequently, 
the idols of the Market-place are some- 
times also idols of the Theatre, which 
is to say, of the Lecture-room, or master 
by whose words we swear. 

"He that will write well in any tongue 
must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to 
speak as the common people speak, but 
think as wise men think." From dis- 
regard of such counsel, many of our aca- 
demic fallacies concerning education have 
arisen. We are involved in questions 
and differences because we have followed 
the false appearances of words, instead 
of setting down in the beginning the defi- 
nitions in which as wise men we may 
[70] 



IDOLS 

concur. In what definition of educa- 
tion is it possible that wise men may con- 
cur ? All will agree that education is a 
process : not that of play, nor yet of work ; 
but of artistic activity. Play meanders 
pleasantly toward an external end of no 
significance. Work drives straight for an 
end beyond that is pleasant because of its 
worth. The process of art has an end but 
not beyond. Its end is in itself; and it is 
pleasurable in its activity because its true 
activity is a result. From play the artistic 
process differs because its end is signifi- 
cant; from work it differs because its end 
is in its activity, and because its activity 
possesses the pleasure of worth. It is 
like religion: a process continually begun, 
and in its incompleteness complete. Its 
ideal is incapable of temporal fulfilment, 
but still, in each moment of development, 
it is spiritually perfect. 
[71] 



IDOLS 

Education, then, is an art — the art 
of the individual realizing himself as 
a member of a society whose tabernacle 
is here but whose home is a house not 
built with hands. Education is the pro- 
cess of knowing the best, enjoying the 
best, producing the best in knowledge, 
conduct and the arts. Realization, 
expression of self, physical, intellectual, 
social, emotional, is its means and end. 
It implies faith in a moral order and 
continuing process, of which it is itself 
an integral and active part. 

It is remarkable with what persistency 
the race of educators has indulged ex- 
tremes. There has been accorded from 
time to time an apostle of the golden 
mean. But his disciples have ever pro- 
ceeded to the ulterior limit: Among the 
ancients to the pole of self-culture or 
to the pole of uncultured service; in the 
[72] 



IDOLS 

dark ages to the ideal of the cloister or 
the ideal of the castle, to joyless learning 
or to feudal, and feminine, approval; 
in the middle ages to the bigotry of the 
obscurantist or the allurement of the 
material; in the Renaissance to contempt 
of the ancients or to neo-paganism — to 
theological quibbles or to Castiglione, to 
the bonfire of vanities or the carnal 
songs of Lorenzo; in the Reformation, to 
compulsory discipline or the apotheosis 
of natural freedom; in the succeeding 
age to pedantry or deportment. Still 
later appear Rousseau and the phil- 
anthropists with the "return to nature," 
the worship of individuality, the methods 
of coddling and play; and then Jacotot 
— and the equal fitness of all for higher 
education, the exaggeration of inductive 
methods, the chimerical equivalence of 
studies. And now has arrived the sub- 
[73 1] 



IDOLS 

ordination of the art to pure profit, or 
vaudeville, or seminars for sucklings. 
Always the fallacy of the extreme ! . — If 
education is not for the fit it must be for 
imbeciles; if not for culture, for Mam- 
mon ; if not for knowledge, for power ; if 
not of incunabula, of turbines and lim- 
ericks; if not by the cat-o'-nine-tails, by 
gumdrops. Why the mean of a Plato or a 
Quintilian could not obtain — the sanity 
of Melanchthon or Erasmus, of Sturm or 
Comenius, of Milton or the Port Royal, of 
Pestalozzi, Friedrich Wolf or Thomas 
Arnold, — Heaven only knows, which, in 
its unscrutable purpose has permitted 
the race of educators, following the 
devices of their own heart, to go astray 
after idols. 

To know, to feel, to do aright and 
best, each and all in all and each of the 
[74] 



IDOLS 

fields of human activity, that is the art 
of education. 

If we exaggerate one of these functions 
to the neglect of the rest, our education 
is no longer an ideal but an idol. If, 
forgetting that education is an art, we try 
to make of it a pleasant meandering, we 
set up the idol of Play. If, forgetting that 
the activity of Art is of intrinsic value 
and delight, we glorify the empty means 
and merit of drudgery, then we have 
erected the idol of Pedantry: we beat 
the air for discipline, shuffle in and out 
of corners the straw of arid learning, 
and choke ourselves with the dust of our 
own sweeping. If we fix our eyes on 
the cash, we bow to the tribal idol of 
Quick Returns. If we forget that, as 
an art, there is for education a progres- 
sive ideal and a law of progress, too, 
we bow to the idol of Caprice. We 
[75] 



IDOLS 

fall not only into the fallacies already 
enumerated but into the fallacy of the 
equivalence of studies, the fallacy of 
shifting, the fallacy of dissipation. In 
Art each factor is in relation to the rest, 
and all to the whole: we proceed fatu- 
ously upon the assumption that the 
part is the whole; and therefore each 
part equal to each; and therefore one 
study as good as any other. In Art the 
means, which is the end, is relative, 
progressive: we assume comfortably 
that studies are independent of each 
other, that we can take any in any order, 
pass an examination and have done. 
In Art the end, which is the means, is 
absolute and self-referred and ideal: we 
figure that, by dissipating our energies, 
we shall happen to hit, here and now, 
the ideal. Disregarding the progressive 
unity of education we bow to Caprice. 
[76] 



IDOLS 

The idols of the academic market- 
place to-day are Caprice and Quick 
Returns and Play, and, in unexpected 
corners, Pedantry, against which in reac- 
tion these three were set up. Of these, 
Quick Returns was borrowed from the 
tribe; and not alone, for of this sub- 
vention are other tribal gods too numer- 
ous to rehearse — specially Numbers 
and Inevitable Grace and Incidental 
Issues and Parade. To one or other of 
these false worships are due the wane 
of scholarship, the utilitarian tendency, 
the excrescence of non-academic activ- 
ities, the neglected discipline in our 
education at the present time. The 
blame is by no means wholly to be laid 
at the door of the university. It attaches, 
also, to our system of elementary edu- 
cation. 

[77] 



SOME WAGES OF INEVITABLE GRACE, 
CAPRICE AND QUICK RETURNS 



SOME WAGES OF INEVITABLE GRACE, 
CAPRICE AND QUICK RETURNS 

TO LAY the blame upon any one 
university innovation, such as the 
system of admission by diploma, or the 
elective system, or the foundation of pro- 
fessional schools and of departments of 
graduate research, is to misjudge the 
matter. Each of these may have con- 
tributed indirectly to the present imperfec- 
tion of general education ; but each in its 
inception was a response to the demands 
not only of democracy but of advancing 
science. The fault in these innovations 
is not inherent in the theory but in the 
abuse. The abuse is in the application. 
In the continued extension, for instance, 
[81] 



IDOLS 

of the accrediting system, but with per- 
functory or timid supervision, in some 
states, to schools that have exhausted 
the advantages of its fostering care, 
and have reached a self-sufficing and 
somewhat restive independence. Or in 
the careless supervision of schools that 
have not yet attained to the stature 
of wisdom and efficiency requisite for 
the performance of their duty as door- 
keepers of the higher education. In 
either case the test, the emulation and 
award, which are essential to the success 
of the system are slighted. The adminis- 
trators are bowing to the idol of Inevit- 
able Grace; the university is overrun 
with pupils accredited by sloth or fear 
or favour; and the accrediting system, 
which is the pride of Germany and many 
of our American states, is discredited. 
Is it any wonder that in revulsion, there 
[82] 



IDOLS 

is talk of admitting on diploma hon- 
our pupils only, or of testing all in some 
unannounced subject, or of examining 
every one in every subject as in older 
universities ? 

Nor should we lay the blame for our 
present insufficiencies entirely upon the 
elective system. The fault, again, is 
in the abuse. In itself the elective 
system is reasonable, is necessary, is 
of the temper and the time. Only reluc- 
tantly was the old curriculum modified, 
the new welcomed. And as the new 
developed, offering as it seemed a royal 
highway through broader fields of cul- 
ture and new fields of practice, to higher 
classical scholarship, to scientific investi- 
gation, evoking in students a more mature 
and earnest spirit, gratulation gained. 
Why is it that, of latter days, the highway 
has been crowded with students scat- 



IDOLS 

tering and smattering as they go, and 
chattering down the ditch of ease that 
is the descent of Avernus? or that the 
broad driveway itself, like that in Arkan- 
sas, has dwindled to a country road, 
then shrunk to a by-path, and finally to 
a squirrel track and run up a tree and 
into a hole ? Why the inconsequentiality 
on the one hand, and on the other the 
blinding bigotry of the shut mind ? 

Because in its application the system 
has been abused. Partly because, in 
many universities, there has not been a 
proper demarcation between the funda- 
mental cultural studies and methods of the 
first two years, and the more advanced 
studies, with their methods preparatory 
to profession or research, of the later 
years. Because, also, students have not 
always been sufficiently guided in their 
choice by the arrangement and gradation 
[84] 



IDOLS 

of cognate electives in comprehensive 
groups. Also, because the system has 
been pushed steadily down through high 
school, grammar school, primary school, 
to the kindergarten, where, the climate 
being unduly congenial, it has gone 
completely to seed. The free choice 
of studies is not for children, nor for 
most of the teachers of them. From 
year to year increasingly the schools 
have provided the university with pupils 
crammed with sweets of Individual 
Caprice. Spoiled by untimely appli- 
ance of the elective theory, how can 
pupils profit by the system when they 
reach the stage where first they should 
have encountered it? Between the 
unpreparedness of the student for a 
liberal education and the sometimes too 
highly specialized method and interests 
of his university instructor, the liberal 
[85] 



IDOLS 

education drops out ; or, if it is attempted 
by the instructor of the fine, old, well- 
read and humanly interested type, it 
is attempted in vain. 

The school of research is not entirely 
to blame nor the professional schools; 
each has its place. In fact, it is fre- 
quently in such schools alone — and 
here I include the undergraduate voca- 
tional colleges of engineering and the 
like — that a thorough disciplinary and 
informational curriculum is, or can be, 
pursued. And it is to be remarked 
that in the vocational school the methods 
of the old unyielding curriculum are 
largely retained; and so far as the 
achievement of their material end is 
concerned, retained with signal success. 
But how great the loss, how slender the 
success, compared with what might have 
been achieved if students had enjoyed 
[86] 



IDOLS 

in the lower grades the thorough liberal 
education to which they were entitled, 
before entering upon the vocations of 
life! How great the loss for lawyer, 
physician, engineer, captain of industry 
or of commerce, student of theology — 
how great, too, for the specialized Doc- 
tor of Philosophy who, though keen in 
the methods of some science, may never 
have savoured a verse of the classics or 
gleaned the elements of philosophy or 
history or art! Their teachers had 
seduced them to the worship of the idol 
of Quick Returns. 



[87] 



THE COLLAPSE OF CULTURE 



THE COLLAPSE OF CULTURE 

A GENERATION ago the scientists 
warred for recognition as edu- 
cators of youth. They deserved to 
win; and they won. To know the 
law of the natural world is indispens- 
able to him who would understand 
aright the law of the social. A fun- 
damental and sympathetic acquaintance 
with at least one science, such as physics 
or chemistry, is as integral a part of culture 
as a fundamental and sympathetic ac- 
quaintance with the humanities. The 
conflict is no longer between science and 
culture; for science is a face of culture. 
The war now is between the ideal of 
culture and the idol of Quick Returns. 
[91] 



IDOLS 

In preparation for the technical pro- 
fessions and for medicine the culture 
of science is of course nowadays not 
neglected, but the culture of the human- 
ities too frequently is. In preparation 
for law, for theology, for teaching, for 
certain branches of humanistic research, 
the culture of science is frequently 
omitted, the culture of the classical 
humanities slighted. In either case the 
education which should precede vocation 
is lacking; and the pursuit of the vocation 
becomes arid and material. The training 
of imagination, emotion, induction, to be 
derived from a study of our historical and 
literary heritage, is especially necessary to 
the professions and to the nation; and 
especially, to-day, is it cast to the winds. 
The riches and uplift of the humanities 
are bartered for a mess of pottage. 

(Education is to enjoy the best and 
[92] 



IDOLS 

produce the best as well as to know the( 
best. How can one enjoy without know- 
ing; how can one produce in the freedom 
of self-realization, without enjoying? 
What was it Fletcher of Saltoun said ? — 
The songs of a nation, the poetry of a 
nation, the music of a nation, the art of 
a nation, the history of a nation, the ideals 
of a nation, aye, and of a world — these 
are the joy of life, these the impulse to law 
and conduct, and discovery and creation, 
and patriotism and religion. Without the \ 
humanities what man can be educated ? j 
what vocation is more than a meal-check ? 
What is a man profited if he shall gain 
the whole world and lose his own soul ? 
What were a world without Romance ? 

Since spoken word man's spirit stirred 

Beyond his belly-need, 
What is is Thine of fair design 

In thought and craft and deed 

[93] 



IDOLS 

Each stroke aright of toil and fight, 

That was and that shall be, 
And hope too high, wherefore we die, 

Has birth and worth in Thee. 

Especially downtrodden of men is our 
heritage from antiquity. Man will al- 
ways be the heir of all the ages. To sat- 
isfy him with the heritage of a recent 
yesterday, the modern languages and 
literatures, modern history and poetry 
and economics, strive in vain. He 
remains the child of the ages, but a 
child deprived of his full heritage — 
deprived, by a constructive inhibition 
in our schools, of the imaginative, moral, 
and historical training of the Bible, and 
of the inestimable riches of its literature, 
— deprived by delusions of Quick 
Returns and blind Caprice of ancient 
history, poetry, philosophy, the back- 
ground of all that is new — deprived 
[94] 



IDOLS 

of the classics. Upon a first hand 
acquaintance with Greek and Latin clas- 
sics, the appreciation of English and of ( 
all modern literature depends. The 
knowledge of the history of institutions 
and of art depends upon a knowledge 
of the classics. The knowledge of phil- 
osophy depends upon a knowledge of 
the classics. Equipment for liberal 
scholarship of any kind depends upon 
a knowledge of the classics. No better 
training in logical processes was ever 
devised than the philological discipline 
of the classics. No discipline more 
thoroughly systematized, more uniform, 
more definite, more rigorous. No better . 
training in the use of one's own language \ 
than translation from the classics. No * 
better school of poetry or of oratory than * 
the classics. No better gallery of lives — 
which to contemplate is to know that 
[95] 



IDOLS 

virtue is its own reward and vice its 
own penalty. 

To the abandonment of the classics 
with their sweet simplicity and their 
majesty, their orderly restraint and their 
severe regard, I attribute in no small 
degree the declining ability to think 
clearly, to speak and write lucidly, pre- 
cisely, effectively, the declining love of 
noble letters and noble art — the declin- 
ing respect for tradition and authority, 
for the heritage and the faith — the 
declining splendour of the ideal. Shall 
Man, who is the heir of the society of all 
the ages, experience no quiver of historic 
sense, have no glimmer of that liberal art 
and life which led his rude forefathers 
to the enlightenment of civilization? 

Twenty-nine years ago, the Right 
Reverend Samuel Smith Harris, Bishop 
of Michigan, pleading from the platform 
[96] 



IDOLS 

of a great university for the rights and 
privileges of complete education, said: 
"The allurements of mammon and world- 
liness are too often permitted to call our 
ingenuous youth from the proper business 
of the school and college. Short roads and 
by-paths are opened up to tempt them to 
abandon the proper work of education 
and to go prematurely to schools of pro- 
fessional and technical instruction. The 
consequence is the sending forth of half- 
educated men and inexperienced men to 
plead the causes, and heal the diseases, 
and lead the thinking of the generation. 
Let us all protest against this great evil; 
for unless it is counteracted it will lead to 
the impoverishment of the age." It has 
led to the impoverishment of the age. 

The neglect of the humanities is trace- 
able, also, to the pedagogical doctrine 
[97] 



IDOLS 

t of the equivalence of studies : a tenet 
I of Caprice. But there is, in fact, no 
such thing as equivalence of studies 
in discipline, or in informational value, for 
life. The humanities and the sciences 
train faculties the same, or different, in 
different conjunctions and in different de- 
grees. They, severally, impart information 
that has different values for life, or that 
is appropriate to different callings in life. 
If, in obedience to the new psych- 
ology, we surrender the theory of the 
superior discipline of certain studies, 
twe still hold to the superior educational 
\worth of certain studies because of their 
intrinsic value for life. In other words, 
granting that as one of our eminent 
new psychologists has said, "Conscien- 
tious pursuit of any intellectual occupa- 
tion results in rendering the mind more 
efficient in all other lines of work," 
[98] 



IDOLS 

there is still a greater "residual value 
in the character of the subject-matter" 
of certain studies than of others. 

But even in the matter of discipline, it 
is essential that the mental machine be 
trained to run not in one rut but in the 
several grooves "of procedure needful 
in the main divisions of the world 
of mind." And of these procedures that 
which demands mental concentration 
in the highest degree develops best the 
ability to grapple mentally and morally 
with the manifold problems of life. 
That which is capable, because of long 
centuries of educational experience, of 
conveying a discipline most nearly uni- 
form is most to be desired in the train- 
ing of the youth of a democratic republic. 
From this point of view we do not sur- 
render the theory of the superiority of 
the discipline for life as a whole afforded 
[99] 



IDOLS 

by the humanities. The dictum of one 
whose words have found ready acceptance 
these past thirty years, that "the object 
of a liberal and a scientific education is 
fundamentally the same, namely, training 
for power," is one of the most vicious 
fallacies that ever afflicted education. 
Power is not the only object; nor is 
the power the same; nor is the training 
the same; nor are those other objects, 
knowledge and cultivated judgment, the 
same. 

One does not, of course, base an advo- 
cacy of the compulsory study of the 
humanities on the sole ground of formal 
discipline, or of their initial distaste- 
fulness to many — though to persevere 
and to conquer are essential factors in 
education; but one does most emphat- 
ically decline to eliminate from the 
curriculum the comprehensive knowl- 
[100] 



IDOLS 

edge and power for life which the 
humanities, properly taught, convey, in 
favour of vocational preparation, which 
is a kind of child-labour in disguise, or 
of education by capricious choice. All 
that has been said of the compulsory 
study of the humanities applies mutatis 
mutandis to the compulsory study of 
science. To culture both are essential. 



[101] 



SOME WAGES OF PEDANTRY 



SOME WAGES OF PEDANTRY 

IN NO slight measure the worship 
of Caprice and Quick Returns and 
Inevitable Grace owes its supremacy to 
the irrationality of the despotism of the 
idol, once supreme, Pedantry. For the 
reaction against the classics some of 
our classicists are most to blame; more 
broadly, for the reaction against humani- 
ties, some of our, so-called, humanists. 
In a time when the scientific and the 
practical clamoured for their rights the 
humanists babbled of the ideal, mean- 
ing the unpractical. In a time when 
the ideal, worshipped in spirit and in 
truth, might have saved the humanities, 
the teachers of the humanities were 
[105] 



IDOLS 

busy repelling worshippers from the 
shrine with a mystic mumble of glosses, 
textual variants, codices, collations, with 
a processional methodology and grave- 
clothes in monstrance of crumbled com- 
mentators, with grammatic genuflections, 
and a horrific jargon of umlauts, and 
all that windpipe and gullet liturgy 
of anatomical phonetics. Forgetting 
the spirit of the poetry and history 
that they professed, they were insisting 
that even the child should imbibe 
devices esoterically scientific, utterly 
un cultural. So Pedantry stirred a revo- 
lution against its own despotism, and 
the humanities, having joined themselves 
to Pedantry, fell. And in the read- 
justment there arose the trinity of idols 
which presides over this paragraph. 
Also there arose that anarchy of aca- 
demic life, that riot of non-studious 
[106] 



IDOLS 

activities whose deity is the idol of 
Incidental Issues. He may be called 
afso False Culture; and his high priests 
are the Hero of the Campus and the 
Bandar-log. For, teachers of the 
humanities having deserted culture and 
taken to stopping the mouth of the 
hungry with a stone, the hungry repu- 
diated the stone and imagined for them- 
selves a false culture — of the circus, 
stadium and coliseum, of the stage and 
music-hall and toy-Tammany, such as 
they might be expected to devise. But 
since youth must have ideals they draw 
over their idol the cloak of loyalty to the 
university. 

Such evils has the reaction against 
Pedantry produced. But Pedantry 
still counts his idolaters. We, of the 
faculties, continue to invent enormities. 
We are justly proud of our schools of 
[107] 



IDOLS 

graduate research. They have pro- 
duced much in the service of true schol- 
arship, which is life. But, too often, 
we have divorced scholarship from life: 
indeed, life were inept not to file the 
petition himself. We have, too often, 
done all we could to make scholarship 
stupid; if not stupid, unintelligible. 
Too often we have reduced literature 
to a card catalogue, and history to tis- 
sues and bones. We have reasserted 
the creed that learning to be real must 
be dark, to be deep must be narrow. 
We have multiplied levels and stopes 
with never a vein in sight. We have 
invented the thesis. We have invented 
the thesis that cannot survive unless it 
is buried in footnotes. Studying muni- 
cipal law we have invented the thesis 
on the Town Pump. Revelling in the 
High History of the Holy Grail we have 
[108] 



IDOLS 

written reams, to evoke a yawn. As 
fearing lest the fountain of the classics 
might be exhausted, we have taught 
them in thimblefuls, dosing them out. 
As fearing lest the epic survey of history 
may be fiction, and desiring to make 
historians of all freshmen, we have 
taught them documentary research, which 
is for freshmen foolishness. 

We revert as fast as we can to the evils 
of ignorance and pedantry, by entrust- 
ing our younger students to green spe- 
cialists, who astonish and dismay with 
the disjectis mewhris indigestaque 
mole of their investigations. Any 
specialist would be bad enough; but 
a green specialist, that is iniquity. 

The green specialist is not foisted upon 

the freshman by the cult of Pedantry 

alone; but by stringency of poverty. 

Only too many of our young instructors 

[109] 



IDOLS 

are narrow and technical, as compared 
with those of the previous generation 
when liberally educated men could 
afford to teach; when living was cheap, 
and the standard of living, modest. 
But that is another story. Only too 
often our brightest graduates don't teach; 
they seek more lucrative professions. 
The Carnegie Foundation is, we hope, 
contributing to the solution of the prob- 
lem. Though a professor may live poor 
all his life, he need no longer anticipate 
the poor-house for his family. 



[110] 



SOME WAGES OF PLAY 



L^^^cl*^ $^^ lz^$^^<~~~r ^, 



SOME WAGES OF PLAY 

PLAY is essential to healthy develop- 
ment. And the capabilities of the 
individual should be considered in the 
scheme of education. But play is not 
a factor in education. To the wor- 
ship of the idol of Play, set up in the 
academic market-place, we especially 
attribute the lapses of mental and moral 
discipline, unfortunately common among 
our young people of to-day. 

"Follow nature," said Erasmus, revolt- 
ing against the unnatural compulsion 
and technicality of monkish education. 
"Don't shut boys and girls in cloisters 
against their will! Don't roar at them 
and beat them! Don't overwork the 
[113] 



IDOLS 

memory! Make studies interesting! 
You can teach letters as if in play." 
And pedagogical extremists, rejecting 
the birch, have overdone the balm. 
Montaigne overdid it. Locke overdid 
it. Rousseau and the philanthropists 
overdid it. Finally appeared Froebel, 
and his kindergarten overdid it, to death. 
Since Froebel began to have statues in 
our cities, discipline has disappeared 
out of our schools; the memory, for lack 
of exercise, is atrophied — it is a breeder 
of disease, a tonsil, a vermiform appen- 
dix — remains but to cut it out ; the 
child is no longer "born for the uni- 
verse," but for himself; not subject to the 
common training of his kind, but to his 
own sweet will. In the kindergarten 
he learns that there is no such thing as 
application, no such word as "must." 
So with coddling and dawdling and 
[114] 



IDOLS 

marking time, and playing at work and 
"working" the "dear teacher," he 
emerges, not merely inert of mind and 
morals, but pervert. 

May one suggest that bodily exercise, 
ventilation, and the pursuit of happi- 
ness can be secured without turning 
education into " ring-around-a-rosey " ? 
The justification of the kindergarten, 
where children play at bees and birds 
and butterflies, is as a day nursery. 
The public day nursery is a blessing to 
those whose pre-scholastic childhood 
would otherwise be lived in tenements 
and slums; but the blessing should 
not be availed of by parents who can 
amuse their offspring out of the private 
purse until such time as they are put 
to school in earnest. To indulge day 
nurseries in our public schools is to 
indulge in misdirected effort and expense. 
[115] 



IDOLS 

It is to indulge both parents and chil- 
dren in a misconception of the nature 
of education — a misconception based 
upon a criminal fallacy and fraught with 
criminal results. 

The evil that men do lives after them; 
The good is oft interred with their bones. 

The first line Shakespeare wrote for 
Rousseau, the second for Froebel. 
Rousseau and Froebel are the high 
priests of the idol of Play. 

From the idea that education is a 
playful and cosseting operation proceeds 
to some extent the commitment of gram- 
mar schools and high schools to the 
tender sex. For the noble women in 
our schools, serving according to their 
lights and capabilities, I have the sin- 
cerest admiration. They are the natu- 
ral protectors and instructors of the 
[116] 



IDOLS 

early childhood of both sexes. But con- 
cerning the system which commits 
almost exclusively to women the disci- 
pline of maturing boys, I entertain mis- 
givings, mitigated only by the pathos of 
the conditions that seem to have rendered 
the system necessary. From the com- 
bination of Froebelism and Feminization, 
of education by amusement and educa- 
tion by women, much of our lack of 
discipline proceeds. 

Boys of twelve and coming men of 
sixteen cannot be shaped by play. They 
cannot be shaped for the awful choice 
of good and evil by cosseting. Honour 
and obedience are not a matter of 
amusement or of eye-service. Only 
men know the temptations of young 
manhood and only to men will young 
manhood confide its needs. Only by 
men can young men be disciplined to 
[117] 



IDOLS 

do what they must. And only so 
does bitter duty become superlatively 
sweet. By active participation or by 
example the undisciplined product of 
our undisciplinary education swells the 
mob. The effect is evident in the lack 
of reverence for tradition, for authority, 
for order, for righteousness. In the 
lack of patriotism — the highest civic 
ideal. 



[118] 



THE COLLAPSE OF DISCIPLINE 



THE COLLAPSE OF DISCIPLINE 

CI AID an officer of the army to me, the 
^-J other day, an officer of high rank 
and long experience — and he expressly 
permits me to repeat his words: "The 
fatal defect in the efficiency of the Uni- 
ted States Army is the lack of training 
inherent in the course of education 
through which the youth of the country 
have passed. Intelligent military dis- 
cipline depends upon true patriotism, 
patriotism in turn upon early discipline. 
Patriotism is almost a negligible quantity 
in the United States Army. There 
is not an officer of experience in our 
army who, deep down in his heart, 
is not convinced that for these reasons, 
[121] 



IDOLS 

in the initial contact of our army with a 
foreign army of the first class, we should 
meet with disaster." These be bitter 
words; but I cite them for what they 
are undoubtedly worth. 

Note that the speaker is here referring 
not to the volunteer forces of the various 
states. Voluntary service implies early 
training, probably in the home. Of the 
patriotism and adaptability of these forces 
to military discipline no one entertains a 
doubt. My military friend refers to our 
standing army. And though I have made 
frequent inquiry I have yet to find an 
officer of our army who does not respect 
his criticism. He refers tc our standing 
army, and to the difficulty of maintain- 
ing not discipline, but the "intelligent 
military discipline that rests upon patri- 
otism." Patriotism rests upon a train- 
ing in youth which inculcates obedience, 
[122] 



IDOLS 

unselfishness, devotion to a higher self. 
The lack of that spirit on the part of 
the un-American ized immigrants who 
enter the army is intelligible. 

But when we are informed that recruits 
who have passed through our lower 
schools, cannot, in spite of the wisdom, 
patience, and efficiency of our American 
officers, be moulded to the intelligent 
discipline that depends upon patriotism, 
what apology have we educators to 
prefer? Froebelism. What apology 
our cities and States? Feminization. 
With all their appropriation for mate- 
rial comfort in the schools, for mech- 
anism and method — hydra-headed 
and microcephalous — they have failed 
to segregate funds sufficient to win men 
to the ranks of education. Some fine 
men there are; more Miss Nancys. 
Some fine women, infinitely superior 
[123] 



IDOLS 

to the Miss Nancys ; and a mob of mobile 
maidens meditating matrimony. This 
is not alliteration : it is fact. The average 
salary in our public schools is $330 per 
annum. Eighty per cent, of the teachers 
in our schools are women. And the 
average professional life of our women 
teachers is three years. Are they starved 
into matrimony? or do they coquet 
a while on cream-puff salaries ? Under 
such conditions, even if women were 
suited to discipline our maturing boys, 
which they are not — what continuity 
of mental, what of moral discipline, 
can we expect ? If it be objected that 
the roots of discipline and hence of 
patriotism are not in the school but 
the home, I reply that it is our duty, 
as educators, to discipline parents for 
the home. And discipline is not — to 
bow down to the idol of Play. 
[124] 



IDOLS 

Education, as I have said, is the 
process of knowing the best, enjoying 
the best, producing the best; but not 
in the realms of truth and taste alone: 
in the realm of duty, too. The goal of 
all study is service to humanity; more 
directly, service to the home, to society, 
and to the state. That service can be 
rendered only by the man who is sane 
of body as well as of soul. To that 
sanity the essential is duty performed; 
physical duty as well as mental and 
moral. But that duty must be ration- 
ally determined and rigidly exacted. 

So far as the physical welfare of our 
pupils in the public schools is concerned 
it would appear that whatever effort is 
exercised is neither rational nor rigid. 
Turning again to the examination for 
entrance to West Point, we note that 
of a grand total of 351 candidates, 
[125] 



IDOLS 

100 were found to be physically defec- 
tive. "This," says Colonel Larned, 
"is perhaps the most serious feature 
of the exhibit. . . . Public education 
surely has something to do with the 
physical well-being of our children; and 
the benefit to the community of its sys- 
tematic occupation with their develop- 
ment and care in this regard is in no 
respect inferior to the importance of its 
function as a mind-trainer. If the 
standard of mind-development is that 
here shown, then most assuredly ten 
years of systematic body-training would 
produce a benefit to the average child 
vastly superior." Those of us who 
have had experience with a system of 
compulsory gymnastics and military 
drill in state universities can entertain 
no doubt of the tonic effect, moral as 
well as physical. The system should 
[126] 



IDOLS 

certainly be extended to our public 
schools. 

For a like reason and in like way, 
affairs intellectual in our system of edu- 
cation must be reformed. We not only 
fail of discipline, we vitiate the possi- 
bilities of moral training inherent in 
study, so long as we encourage caprice 
in the choice of studies and trifling in 
their pursuit; and, as the last Report 
of the Commissioner of Education 
informs us, allow our pupils in the 
public schools to take 225 holidays 
in the year. I agree with the officer 
whose statistics of the United States 
Military Academy I have quoted, that, 
"properly adapted" to the various needs 
and possibilities of citizenship, "the 
military training and system" of West 
Point, with its prescribed scheme of 
studies, its motive powers of control 
[ 127 ] 



IDOLS 

and award would, if introduced into 
our lower and collegiate schools, do more 
for the development of our youth in 
physical efficiency, scholarship, judg- 
ment, taste, character, in short in 
preparation for citizenship — than any 
system now pursued. Save so far as 
a general choice between industrial or 
academic schooling is conceded, the 
pupil should encounter no elective sys- 
tem until he is ready to enter upon the 
true university course which now begins 
with the beginning of the junior year, 
and even then a system so rationalized 
that the perils do not outweigh the 
privileges. 



[128] 



IDOLS OF THE ACADEMIC CAVE 



IDOLS OF THE ACADEMIC CAVE 

THE long and short of it is that 
we, educators, don't educate. We 
are fuddled with educational fads; and 
we fuddle the schools in turn. From 
the universities the cry goes up, "How 
do more than we do?" By doing fewer 
things and better; by requiring more 
of the schools. From the schools the 
cry goes up, "The universities require 
too much already. How do more than 
we can?" By doing fewer things and 
better. The universities do not require 
too much, nor so much as, in the near 
future, they will require. The schools 
are trying not much but many things. 
They are fuddled with fads of pedago- 
[131] 



IDOLS 

gic ignorance and conceit. They can 
do more by trying less: Less number 
and variety of studies, less dawdling 
over them, less futile and mortal repe- 
tition, less subdivision into arbitrary 
cabins and compartments and two-inch 
treads of knowledge, less fear of over- 
taxing the memory, less coddling of the 
child, less experimentation with half- 
fledged theories of pedagogy, and with 
fads that are the source of laughter to 
gods and men. They can do more by 
trying less: Less spelling of words 
without syllables, and of syllables with- 
out letters; less baby arithmetic, and 
ten-year old arithmetic, and fifteen- 
year old arithmetic; less partial pay- 
ments, and discounts, and calculations 
on stocks and bonds, for girls and those 
who having escaped being girls may also 
escape Wall Street; less encyclopedic 
[132] 



IDOLS 

jumble of geography; less literary criti- 
cism and more grammar; at least two 
or three less of the weary repetitions 
of United States history. Fewer dif- 
ferent kinds of effort, in other words — 
and more intellectual effort in funda- 
mentals on the part of the child. Some 
accuracy in something. Less experi- 
mentation with half -fledged theories of 
pedagogy, and with fads that are the 
laughter of gods and men. Less worship 
of the idols of the Cave. 

The waste of time is appalling; and 
it is ultimately traceable in our element- 
ary schools, to the worship of idols of 
the Cave. 

"My little boy," writes Peter McArthur, 

My little boy is eight years old, 

He goes to school each day; 
He doesn't mind the tasks they set — 

They seem to him but play. 

[133] 



IDOLS 

He heads his class at raffia work, 

And also takes the lead 
At making dinky paper boats — 

But I wish that he could read. 

They teach him physiology, 

And oh, it chills our hearts 
To hear our prattling innocent 

Mix up his inward parts. 
He also learns astronomy 

And names the stars by night; 
Of course he's very up-to-date, 

But I wish that he could write. 

They teach him things botanical, 

They teach him how to draw; 
He babbles of mythology 

And gravitation's law; 
The discoveries of science 

With him are quite a fad. 
They tell me he's a clever boy, 

But I wish that he could add. 

From such schools pupils are sent to the 
high school deficient not only in knowl- 
[134] 



IDOLS 

edge but in discipline; and in these 
new grades further waste of time is 
consequently inevitable. With proper 
teaching, at least three priceless years 
could be saved of a schoolboy's life by 
the age of eighteen. 

It is the opinion of our most able 
superintendents of schools that reform 
is impossible until we have more com- 
petent teachers. It is impossible until 
we cease our fads of pedagogic igno- 
rance and conceit. At present we are 
chopping wood with a dull axe. But 
instead of grinding the axe we step 
aside to chew tobacco and theorize. 
Teachers when incompetent are so, prin- 
cipally, because they are ignorant. Our 
theorists are to blame. They try to 
dissipate the ignorance of teachers, not 
by teaching them some one thing which 
they shall teach, but by teaching them 
[135] 



IDOLS 

how to teach all things that they do 
not know. 

I have the profoundest respect for 
historians and philosophers of education, 
themselves learned men in special fields, 
like the late Professors Payne and Hins- 
dale, and the Honourable William T. 
Harris, and the heads of educational 
departments in some of our great uni- 
versities. But the sciolists who, ignor- 
ant of any art or science, dabble in all — 
who walk up and down in our schools, 
prating of the science of education (as 
if there were yet any such science), 
and tempting aside the learner from 
learning what is tried and fast in the 
subject that he would teach (be it history 
or Latin or English), to the pursuit of 
so-called laws, principles, methods, not 
yet concurred in by the wise, not yet 
possible to be derived from facts not 
[136] 



IDOLS 

yet ascertained, still less observed and 
systematized — such sciolists do not 
command respect. We have sympathy 
for the undergraduate whose instructor 
in pedagogy advised her to drop Greek 
and take Ventilation of the School- 
room. "I came to college to get an 
education," she replied, "not a teach- 
er's certificate." In our graduate cur- 
riculum there is a place for the history of 
education ; and for practice in teaching — 
for though a teacher, like a poet, is born, 
not made, the self-made man must try 
himself on a few times before he is fin- 
ished. But the place is not in the under- 
graduate, still less in the usual so-called 
"Normal" School course. Most of the 
methods and theories of the sciolists are 
fallacies of ignorance and personal con- 
ceit — what Bacon calls idols of the 
Cave. They waste the time of the earn- 
[137] 



IDOLS 

est student; they delude the incompetent 
into a profession that demands not so 
much method as scholarship and innate 
aptitude; and they bewilder the schools. 

These, then, are some of the idols, to 
which American education has done 
homage: idols of the Tribe — the Popu- 
lar Voice, Inevitable Grace, Numbers, 
Quick Returns, Parade, and False 
Culture; idols of the Market-place 
and Theatre — Caprice and Pedantry 
and Play; and the idols of the Cave. 
But the homage is the error of a troubled 
dream, whose image, when we awake, 
we shall despise. Some of the remedies 
have already been implied. Others, 
knowing that it is not the better part of 
valour, I shall venture to suggest. Hav- 
ing heard that Ephraim was joined to 
his idols, I have not let him alone. I 
[ 138 ] 



IDOLS 

have committed the indiscretion of writ- 
ing a book about him — a Zoar of a 
book, to be sure; but then, I have laid 
myself open. If now, in addition, I 
write of ideals, what will Ephraim call 
them ? 



[139] 



SOME " IDOLS " OF MY OWN 



SOME " IDOLS " OF MY OWN 

MR. HOMER EDMISTON, in an 
article on Classical Education in 
America, has recently maintained that 
the essential excuse for learning " is the 
mastery and possession, complete and 
permanent, of knowledge and forms of 
skill that prepare for the business of 
life." And, with such learning in mind, 
he extols the method of apprentice- 
ship — "a few pupils with a similar bent 
and promise under a master who works" 
— the method that, during the Middle 
Ages and the Renaissance, produced in 
art and the handicrafts generations of 
disciples, many of them more excellent 
than their masters. 

[143] 



IDOLS 

Now, so far as the learning of an art 
or handicraft goes, there is some truth in 
this contention. But mere learning is 
not education. And if it were, the ques- 
tion would still remain how to impart it 
in such caravanseries as now pose for 
universities and public schools ? To 
provide on the one hand for that 
mastery of special knowledge, and of 
special forms of skill, which prepares 
for a special business in life; and, on 
the other hand, to provide for that 
broader discipline which prepares for 
the general business of life; and so to 
arrive at true education — that is the 
problem. 

To begin with, our preparatory schools, 
from lowest to highest, must be tho- 
roughly differentiated as industrial and 
academic. And these being the main 
educational courses in our schools, bridges 
[144] 



IDOLS 

must be provided from one to the other, 
at appropriate intervals: at ten and four- 
teen years of age; or, perhaps better still, 
at twelve and fifteen — the lines of division 
marking the introductory, and the ad- 
vanced, high school. By such bridges the 
lad who, beginning with the industrial and 
commercial, develops an adaptability to 
the academic, may pass over to it; or 
the lad, who, beginning with the aca- 
demic, betrays aptitude for the industrial, 
or is compelled thereto, may prepare 
himself for a career none the less 
useful that it is not ordinarily called 
professional. 

It must no longer be possible to say 
that we are " far behind European coun- 
tries in the matter of fitting girls and boys 
for a trade"; that the American school- 
boy too often "does not know what to do 
when turned away from school" ; or that, 
[145] 



IDOLS 

as in New York, "one-fourth of the boys 
leave the public school before graduation, 
because they are * sick of it.'" They are 
sick of it, because not enough of them 
have gone straight to the industrial school ; 
and because the industrial school itself is 
neither sufficiently practical nor suffic- 
iently ideal. In the industrial schools of 
the future manual and commercial train- 
ing must of course predominate, but not, as 
now, to the exclusion of the essentials and 
ideals of literature, history and pure sci- 
ence. There must be training of imagi- 
nation, sensibility, civic interest: these 
things are poetry of nature and humanity 
alike. And the industrial discipline 
itself must be practical and purpose- 
ful. It must not be, as too frequently 
now, arid and meaningless because ex- 
perimental; nor on account of unwieldy 
classes, as now, must it be superficial. I 
[146] 



IDOLS 

would propose that such schools avail 
themselves of the cooperation of trades- 
unions. In this way, alone, will the prac- 
tice that makes practical, as well as pur- 
poseful, be assured. Pupils should be 
apprenticed by twos and threes, or in 
somewhat larger squads, to the masters 
of actual industry — even during the years 
of the school course. And the months, 
or weeks, or hours, of such apprenticeship, 
genuine in quality but not excessive in 
amount, should reasonably contribute to- 
ward the completion of the requirements 
of the industrial curriculum. In such 
manner, I believe that the best feature of 
mediaeval training can be revived, and 
at the same time adapted to the broader 
needs and opportunities of the modern. 

In the academic schools the prelimi- 
nary to reform is the elimination of 
[147] 



IDOLS 

incompetency and irrelevancy. The ex- 
ample of Germany, France and England, 
shows that years may be saved. To ob- 
ject that American conditions are different 
from European is to beg the question. 
They are different — economic, social, 
civil, intellectual; but the difference is 
in our favour. To urge that the Ameri- 
can purpose is different is disingenuous. 
The purpose is everywhere the same — 
to get ready for life: the business of it, a 
business in it. We do not get ready for 
life by an ignorant loitering. Let us eli- 
minate incompetency and irrelevancy from 
our common schools; and encourage our 
best high schools to take over the first two 
years of work now covered by our colleges. 
So doing, we shall not only multiply cen- 
tres of academic learning that prepare for 
life in their several communities and that 
uplift those communities, we shall hasten 
[148] 



IDOLS 

the advent of the true university that 
prepares for the higher walks of life and 
uplifts the nation. 

I am not advocating the addition of 
years in time to the high school course, but 
of years in achievement. I am advocat- 
ing, if you will, a twelve-year common 
school in which, by the time the boy is 
ready to enter college, two years have 
been saved : saved from waste and added 
to wisdom. Our best school-masters tell 
us that even three years might be saved. 
Our best schools save one or two already. 
Our schoolboy of sixteen should do the 
work he is now beginning in college at 
eighteen. It is a question not of longer 
schooling but of better; and the response 
must come from the teacher. What we 
need is an educative system and teachers 
who are educated. Some one adds 
"and homes that educate." Yes: but 
[149] 



IDOLS 

schools to educate the homes. To defer 
reform in the schools till the homes 
are reformed is to defer education till 
nobody needs it. 

What we need is an educative system 
and teachers who are educated. If the 
university should require that, within the 
next six years, the high school shall accom- 
plish one year of work more than at pres- 
sent, the high school will require that, 
within the next three years, the eight 
grades below it shall have accomplished 
one year more of work than at present. 
Within twelve years our best universities 
will have relegated the courses of the 
Lower Division, that is to say, of their 
present freshman and sophomore years, 
to the high school. By the elimination 
of fads, frivolity and ignorance from the 
educational system of our preparatory 
schools, and the substitution of systema- 
[150] 



IDOLS 

tized instruction in fundamentals, the 
pupil will be enabled to enter the uni- 
versity at eighteen, prepared to do the 
work with which the university should 
begin, that is, the work of our present 
third, or junior year. 

Our academic high school will devote 
itself to one common drill for all, a drill 
prescribed and thorough in the humani- 
ties prerequisite to the liberal study of any 
higher profession. If the high school 
be of six years, it may profitably fall into 
two divisions: the introductory, taking 
pupils from the twelfth to the fifteenth 
year; and the advanced. The former 
will fit the pupil who ceases his schooling 
at fifteen for apprenticeship in a business 
or professional occupation. Having be- 
gun his study of foreign languages in the 
elementary school at ten, as he should, 
he will at fifteen have acquired the fund- 
[151] 



IDOLS 

amentals of two, and the elements of a 
science, of mathematics, English, history, 
geography and civil government, suffi- 
cient for an introduction to independent 
culture and the conduct of life. He will 
be where the pupil of seventeen now is. 
The advanced high school will fit pupils 
for college. Its graduate of eighteen will 
be where the pupil of twenty now is, or 
should be. He will enter the university, 
not only equipped with three foreign 
languages — one ancient and two mod- 
ern, or two ancient and one modern — 
but with a significant knowledge of 
English, history, mathematics, and sci- 
ence — which is a humanity — to his 
credit, besides. 

There will naturally be those who, 

having completed the reformed school 

curriculum, will desire, because of limited 

means, to proceed immediately to the pro- 

[152] 



IDOLS 

fessional schools. And for some time to 
come, I imagine that such proceeding 
will be permitted. They will unfortu- 
nately forfeit the more liberal training of 
the collegiate course; but, more tho- 
roughly and broadly prepared than now 
for the professional course, they will 
enter upon the career of life not only 
at an earlier age but with greater prom- 
ise of success than at present would 
be possible. 



[153] 



SOME MORE "IDOLS" OF MY OWN 



SOME MORE "IDOLS" OF MY OWN 

fTlHE student entering the collegiate 
-*• department of the university will 
choose between systems of study different 
from those now offered — systems organ- 
ized and rationalized ; one as a liberal intro- 
duction to vocational studies ; the other as 
a vocational discipline in liberal studies. 
He will take his B. A. or his B. S. in a 
rational course of academic studies — at 
twenty-one; and his Ph.D., or his pro- 
fessional or technical, advanced degree at 
twenty-three or twenty-four, with a liberal 
education as the basis of all. 

He has been grounded in the funda- 
mentals of education. If he has already 
resolved upon a career in law, or medi- 
[157] 



IDOLS 

cine, or theology, in engineering or any 
other of the professions of applied science, 
he will enter upon a system that may 
be called liberal-vocational: vocational 
in outlook and aim, but liberal in breadth 
and method. His election of a curric- 
ulum or "school" will be free within the 
limits which he has set for himself ; but his 
selection of studies within that school will 
be confined to the groups of cognate dis- 
ciplines prescribed for its proper function. 
His attitude toward education will be 
altogether other than that which now too 
frequently obtains. He has but three 
years for the normal completion of his 
curriculum; and of that curriculum the 
requirements will not, as now, be satisfied 
by the mere heaping up of " credits " on dis- 
continuous "courses," but by the ability to 
pass examinations upon divisions of study 
more comprehensive than any subsidiary 
[158] 



IDOLS 

"course" or "courses" conducted in class. 
These general examinations will, more- 
over, be entrusted not to the lecturer or 
tutor who has in part covered the sub- 
jects in course, but to independent com- 
missions of specialists. The "snap" and 
"snap professor" will lapse into desuetude. 
The student will rest upon his own respon- 
sibility. He will have little leisure for 
nonsense, or temptation toward the sham 
culture and strenuous parade of "student 
activities." No discipline that is set be- 
fore him can appear meaningless if it 
form a practical and integral part of the 
training which he himself has elected to 
pursue. Nor will the Latin or Greek, 
the history or science, the modern lan- 
guages or the political and economic theory 
prescribed by the system which he has 
elected be any the less liberal in educa- 
tional effect for the conduct of life, 
[159] 



IDOLS 

because it happens to be pursued in the 
rational attempt to fit oneself for an 
occupation in life. 

Such a student if he look toward law 
as his chosen career, will proceed in his 
academic course at once to liberal studies 
in jurisprudence. The liberal vocational 
system, upon which he enters, premises 
the fundamental disciplines. It does not, 
on that account, duplicate the purely 
professional course of the Law School. 
The technical training of that course lies 
beyond. The curriculum which he now 
undertakes provides for ultimate higher 
vocational ends by an immediate train- 
ing in liberal methods and materials. 
He will not be plunged into the codes and 
statutes of a particular state. He will 
pursue studies general and comparative. 
He will be drilled, and he will drill him- 
self, in history, constitutional and polit- 
[160] 



IDOLS 

ical, American and European; in political 
theory and economy; in formal logic and 
practical argumentation; in master- 
pieces of prose, Latin and English; in 
the Institutes of Gaius and Justinian, at 
first hand; in Plato's Republic and Aris- 
totle's Politics, at first hand if he can; 
in Gneist, Savigny and De Tocqueville at 
first hand, because he can; in the prin- 
ciples of jurisprudence and the history of 
legal institutions; and in international 
law. He will pursue a course none the 
less liberal in its culture because voca- 
tional in its interest; none the less vo- 
cational in intent because, in method 
and scope, liberal. His course is rational 
because wisely prescribed ; but with some 
margin of choice for the tasting of sciences 
or arts not prescribed. The liberal- 
vocational student is not grabbing for 
quick returns. He takes his bachelor's 
[161] 



IDOLS 

degree in three years thus spent; and in 
two more, strictly professional, his higher 
degree, and begins the practice of law. 
In theology a similar system of rational 
study for the bachelor's degree will be 
provided: liberal in linguistic, historical, 
philosophical, scientific scope; and on 
that account all the more practical in the 
long run. In medicine, too, a system 
of training in one division, which, strictly 
prescribed, shall include a discipline in 
correlated disciplines of science and art. 
And in commerce, and in engineering and 
the other branches of applied science. But 
in every case the liberal shall precede or 
accompany; and in every case there shall 
be reserved to the student a reasonable 
possibility of tasting unrelated disciplines. 

If, on the other hand, our freshman 
of the new dispensation enter college 
[162] 



IDOLS 

not yet fixed in his choice of a career — 
if he desire yet a season to fit himself for 
the general business of life, he will find 
prepared for his emergency, too, a rational 
system of study. The material and end 
shall, as he desires, be liberal; but the 
method will be none the less severe, 
purposeful, vocational. He enters upon 
a vocational discipline in liberal studies. 
As things now are in most of our uni- 
versities, such a student choosing at 
random and unguided, from his junior 
year on, subjects unrelated in material, 
method and sequence, bladders himself 
out with "ragged notions and babble- 
ments." If, perchance, he devote him- 
self to one subject alone, English, Sans- 
krit, or entomology, he issues narrow of 
beam and unballasted of wit. My pro- 
posal is that we do not ride him on a 
merry-go-round, or clap him into a 
[163] 



IDOLS 

straight- jacket : that we educate him. 
That we give him, in the preparatory 
school, the liberal foundation requisite 
for the business of life; that we give him 
in college the vocational method for a 
business in life, even though that business 
be cultural or scientific. 

He may choose the classics, or the 
modern languages, or English, or history, 
or the natural sciences as the core of his 
college course. But he will be placed 
in a school of disciplines prescribed for 
the end that he professes. He will not 
be suffered to pursue his subject out of 
relation to others requisite to rounded 
culture on the one hand, and to vocational 
opportunity on the other. He will not 
be permitted to devote two or three mor- 
tal years to English, for instance, out of 
relation to other modern poetry, to 
classical as well as to Germanic or Ro- 
[164] 



IDOLS 
mance philology, out of relation to polit- 
cal and social history, and to philosophy. 
Nowadays we seem to think that when 
the Junior (who is not quite the equal of 
our future Freshman) has chosen his 
"major" or special study, he has passed 
the stage when guidance of choice is 
necessary. We let him narrow himself to 
the special study, or let him group about 
it what accessories he will. He emerges 
technically learned, perhaps ; but with an 
immaturity of training and an innocence 
of correlations. His house of life is a piti- 
ful attic; and its underpinning wobbles. 
For such a youth, whether he tend 
toward a career of teaching or of learning 
for learning's sake, the curriculum must 
be rationalized. His special subject or 
group must be studied as a factor of a 
"school" in which the disciplines are 
strictly prescribed — liberal in material 
[165] 



IDOLS 

and end, but of vocational applicability 
in method. Whatever freedom of elec- 
tive he may have, after once electing his 
school, must be within the limits per- 
scribed by his instructors. His stand- 
ards, too, must rise above the levels of 
the daily class and course. He must, as 
I have before insisted, be thrown upon 
his own responsibility; he must pass 
examinations set upon his own reading, 
by those who do not know him. These 
examinations should sift out the "pass" 
men from the "honour" men; and the 
results should be published. We must 
rid ourselves of the fallacy of Inevitable 
Grace. Students should not be allowed 
to think that no one cares how well they 
do, or ill. Students should not be allowed 
to feed themselves through college hand- 
to-mouth on school-boy quizzes and per- 
sonally conducted examinations; leaning, 
[ 166 ] 



IDOLS 

when faint, upon the instructor like sick 
kittens against a hot brick. Emulation 
may be damnable, but it is the spice of 
life. Inevitable Grace may be divine, 
but it never won a job: a pulpit or a 
professor's chair, a shoemaker's awl or a 
seat on change, or a human soul. 

If we of the faculties shed some of our 
delusions; if we simply see to it that the 
student sees what he is driving at, and why, 
and make him drive and drive hard, he will 
no longer delude himself into the belief that 
by extra-curriculum activities he best pre- 
pares himself for life. We shall not only 
enhance scholarship but relegate campus 
activities to an existence which, because 
inconspicuous, will offer opportunity for 
genuine self-sacrifice to their supporters. 

This is not to relegate all liberal studies 
to the high school; it is not to turn the 
[167] 



IDOLS 

university into a congeries of professional 
schools; it is not to squeeze the college 
out of existence. It is to elevate the 
university college in degree, to rationalize 
it in kind. If by "college" we mean a 
home of outworn ideals, or ideals that 
have lost their wits — a refuge for aim- 
less studies, headless theories, footless 
methods, the sooner we squeeze the 
"college" out the better. But the "col- 
lege" is not the asylum of delusions. It 
is not of the ideal because unpractical, 
but of the practical because ideal. 

If what I urge is to vocationalize the 
liberal studies so that they may prepare 
one for an occupation in life, it is also to 
liberalize the vocational that they may 
prepare one for the conduct of life — 
the business inherently undefined, not 
within the forecast of the individual, the 
business of finding oneself, of turning 
[168] 



IDOLS 

within the boat's length, of steaming 
forward in unknown seas. The pro- 
posal is, in brief, that the college abandon 
the fallacy of indiscriminate electives; 
or of a self-chosen, baseless and inade- 
quate group, incapable of superstructure; 
or of a major — an isolated study — 
that may lead to pedantry or the super- 
ficial practical, but never to the educa- 
tion that is for life. The proposal is to 
rationalize our systems of study. There 
is in President Hadley's reiterated epi- 
gram: "The ideal college education is 
one where a student learns things that 
he is not going to use in after life, by 
methods that he is going to use," a 
Chestertonian virtue. It teases truth, 
but comforts while it mocks. The ideal 
college education is precisely not what 
President Hadley says it is, but what you 
see he might have said: It is where a 
[169] 



IDOLS 

student learns things and methods that 
he is going to use in after life; but not 
the things and methods that he is going 
to use for one use only. The latter 
learning is of the professional school. 

This rationalizing of the college may 
seem to some of my readers new and 
therefore impracticable; but it is not 
new at all. The curricula of the uni- 
versities of Oxford and Cambridge, lead- 
ing to the degree of bachelor of arts, 
which we in America have been prone 
to regard as purely cultural and hence 
unpractical, have for years been more 
practical than our American curricula 
now are. Their Final Honour Schools 
in the Literae Humaniores, English, 
Modern History and Oriental Languages 
are liberal of the vocational character- 
istics already described. Their schools of 
Jurisprudence and Theology are liberal- 
[170] 



IDOLS 

vocational. Their final schools, whether 
for honours or not, in the departments 
mentioned above, and in Mathematics, 
Natural Sciences, and Medicine, pre- 
suppose a basis in the Holy Scriptures, 
classics, mathematics, history, philosophy, 
logic and a modern foreign language. 
Their most vocational of courses leading 
to the bachelor's degree, the medical, 
turns out men of culture. Their most 
liberal, that in the Literae Humaniores, 
especially despised by our practical peda- 
gogues as of idle culture, monastic, anti- 
quated, for the aristocratic few, is in fact 
the most practical propaedeutic to any 
profession, and for any class of society, 
in the English-speaking world, to-day. 



[171] 



OBITER DICTA 



OBITER DICTA 

TET us, with a higher grade of fresh- 
-■— * men entering our universities, and 
with systems of study to offer them, 
insist that scholarship be supreme. Let 
us encourage intellectual emulation by 
the methods that I have suggested — 
by eliminating the "snap" and its pro- 
fessor, by modifying the merit of "heaped- 
up" courses, by moulding the student 
but, still, throwing him more upon his 
unaided effort, by emphasizing scope, im- 
partiality and rigour of examination, and 
by enforcing publicity of award and of 
awarded responsibilities. So doing, we 
shall offset the culture of Incidental 
Issues, Parade and Play. We shall 
[175] 



IDOLS 

explode the folly of athletics at long 
range; abate the hysteria of the ludi 
maximi. As to the extravagance incident 
upon gladiatorial combats — let us, at 
once, eliminate all that savours of pro- 
fessionalism and the Flavian Amphi- 
theatre. Let us, at once, revise the 
rules of the game that necessitate pugi- 
listic proficiency, and, hence, protracted 
periods of professional inurement, and, 
hence, salaried coaches and trainers and 
such like lanistae, masseurs and scrapers 
and oilers, and training tables and special 
gratuities of food and raiment, and hence 
colossal expenditures, and colossal risks, 
and corvees and benevolences, and 
colossal gate-receipts. Let us abolish 
the nightmare of frantic excess and car- 
nal hostility, and strife and blood and 
dust. Let us make of football not a 
menace to morals and manners, life and 
[176] 



IDOLS 

limb, but a generous rivalry, a pastime 
in which all may engage, a clean and 
wholesome sport. In brief, let us culti- 
vate athletics for education; not for the 
"thug" or the "bookie" or the "bum." 
A serious obstacle to education is the 
ever-increasing mass of the university. 
The more we subdivide the better. But 
the more spontaneous the cleavage — the 
more characteristic the constituent 
groups, the more cohesive each, and the 
more manageable. In our Greek-letter 
fraternities, and in similar house-clubs 
we have even now a germ of marvellous 
academic potentiality. Our fraternities 
are American in origin and in spirit. 
Their process is of natural selection. 
Their membership includes instructors 
as well as students. In the fraternity 
is one solution of the difficulty of num- 
bers. Let us persuade our fraternities 
[177] 



IDOLS 

to revise the policy of choosing members, 
once in a while, for promise of scholar- 
ship. And let us found within our fra- 
ternities and house-clubs graduate fellow- 
ships with residence in the house. Such 
fellowships will not only elevate the 
standard of the sodalities themselves, 
but constitute the initial step toward 
the realization of a system of colleges of 
resident students and instructors, mu- 
tually stimulating, within the university. 
Of the common sense of our students, 
of their desire to benefit by the oppor- 
tunities offered them, I have no doubt. 
The essential of reform is that we, of 
the faculties, do our duty. In one of 
Frank Norris's novels there is a sailing 
master who fears that his captain hav- 
ing failed to reach the Pole, will take to 
writing books and lecturing. "I 
wouldn't be so main sorry," says the 
[178] 



IDOLS 

broken-hearted tar to the heroine, "I 
wouldn't be so main sorry that he won't 
reach the Pole, as that he quit trying. 
. . . The danger don't figure; what 
he'd have to go through with don't fig- 
ure; nothing in the world don't figure; 
it's his work; God A'mighty cut him 
out for that, and he's got to do it. Ain't 
you got any influence with him, Miss? 
Won't you talk good talk to him ? Don't 
let him chuck; don't let him get soft. 
Make him be a Man and not a pro- 
fessor." 

Let us be Men. Let us keep unde- 
sirables out of the university. Let us 
eliminate the obsolete features, and com- 
bine the best, of the admission by exam- 
ination and the admission by accredit- 
ing. Let us say to the Bandar-log, " You 
may swing by your tail if you will, when 
you're not in the Palace; but if you 
[179] 



IDOLS 

don't come down now and find out what 
the Palace is for, and do it, you shall go 
back to the jungle and swing by your 
tail forever." Let us cultivate closer 
personal relations with our young men 
that they may be neither futile nor utili- 
tarian, neither Bandar-logs nor Men of 
Argos — that their youth may not be 
"a blunder, their manhood a vain strug- 
gle, their old age a regret." Let us be 
none the less learned, but, let us not be 
merely specialists. Let us be Men. Let 
us pay less attention to mechanism and 
more to teaching, inspiring, humanizing. 
Let us make the college the gateway, 
not of loafing and vain delights and dis- 
sipated energies and immaterial triumphs, 
not of mistaken ideals — utilitarian or 
professional, profitless learning or vacu- 
ous method — but of the glorious world 
of conduct and opportunity, of life. 
[180] 



IDOLS 

Our remedies lie in ourselves. And 
even though this generation of students 
and of teachers may have failed of the 
ideal, we shall know that, for the next, 
some idols have been swept away. 



THE END 



[181] 



FEB 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 






